frgtpsswrdlame

>I think we should revisit the policy of an actual forced savings account - rather than the bad proxies for it: social security, home equity, 401k.

I think social security is a far better setup than forced savings account. The fact that it's much harder to raid, that it's not really 'your money' locked up somewhere is a big reason why it has lasted as long as it has.

So this guy had a few twitter exchanges with Luigi and he thinks the US healthcare system isn't that bad? Doesn't really seem like an article for HN. But as long as we're here I think, sort of like Luigi, I'll let other people argue about whether the US healthcare system functions well or efficiently. But as for this:

>While it’s true that UnitedHealthcare has the highest denial rate for medical claims, the CEO doesn’t set the approval rate of a health insurance company’s payouts — that’s done by the actuaries, who themselves are constrained by various considerations, such as the need to keep costs low, including for policyholders.

By this logic, what can Brian Thompson be said to be responsible for? It's very strange to me to assign more responsibility for a companies denial rates to its actuaries than the actuaries' bosses bosses boss. So why exactly does UHC have higher denial rates than other companies? It just happens to be that it's actuaries are more frugal? This explanation doesn't hold water and I think it's a strange response to the shooting of a CEO to say, well actually CEOs aren't responsible for the things their corporations do. Of course they are, now they aren't solely responsible, but they probably have more responsibility than any other single individual. It can be completely true that killing Brian Thompson was wrong AND that he was no saint, being responsible for (and getting rich off of) large amounts of human misery inflicted on UHC policy holders by the organization he headed.

Regarding this part:

Clarification of specialty role

  - Less strict on the direct link between degree/job responsibilities

  - Recognizes that AI may require multiple academic background

You really won't need to clarify whether the role is a specialty one or not if you just increase the minimum wage for H1Bs. I really don't know why we don't have some rule that pins H1B wages to like the 90th percentile wage.

10 people died from the Boars Head contaminated meat. I guess I don't really mind if a few lawyers chase those ambulances and extract a lot of money out of that company?

I thought the issue was deregulation? Something like Trump rolled back some rules about oversight and then Biden never put them back into place? Does the USDA even have the power to fix this?

Anyways, having a pregnant wife right now, it's worrying that listeria is on the rise. We're already avoiding stuff like deli meat but when there's listeria in the frozen waffles, mushrooms, and vegetables you have to wonder what's really going on.

If you're the only one that can come close. Kaggle competition prizes are about focusing smart people on the same problem. But it's very rare for one team to blow all the others out of the water. So if you wanted to make a business out of the problem kaggle will (probably) show the best you could do and still have no moat.

>characteristic of these use cases is that there is no one right answer

I think what you mean is that they work best in cases where it's very hard to measure how well they are working.

Yeah but what made Twitter twitter wasn't really the usercount, it was the mix of established voices and complete randos mixing. If the journalists and economists and politicians go to Bluesky, it will win. I definitely don't think that's a given but it seems much more plausible now than it did a few months ago.

I mean what if it is a toss up? Were we talking about a literal, actual coin flipping, calling it as 50-50 is a better insight than calling it as either heads or tails.

I like the dashboarding more than the analysis lol. I think FL is just a red state now and positing it as anything else smells a little fishy to me. Also, I think there's a thing now where all sorts of analysts know they can get a name out of making one big correct prediction that everyone else got wrong. That's lead to a lot of predictions being made with the intention of being contrarian.

Judging by my twitter feed, some scientists are starting to push back on the use of UMAP (and t-SNE.)

I still don't get the impetus or desire to make NNs work better for tabular data. Regression works pretty well and is easy to interpret/diagnose/work with. GBMs work really well (given a few considerations) and is trickier to work with but nothing crazy. When I see all the fancy hijinks people get up to when applying NNs to audio/text/pictures I think it's really cool but also not something I'd want to have to do if I didn't absolutely need to when working with data out of a relational db. And anyways, how much of a benefit could it actually bring? GBMs are already capable of fitting and dramatically overfitting most datasets.

>On what basis do you believe the explosion was more likely to be Israeli than Hamas?

First, you'll notice I never actually said this.

>1. Hamas is extremely willing to sacrifice their own people in pursuit of their goals.

Not even Israel claims it was Hamas intentionally bombing the parking lot.

>2. Hamas was making homemade rockets out of water pipe. Far less reliable than Israeli munitions.

Sure, but not sure the relevance of this, yes, it could be an accidental misfire Hamas munition. It could also be a purposeful firing of Israeli munition.

>3. Isreal has demonstrated over and over that they will bend over backwards to minimize civilian casualties

I do not believe this is true.

>4. Israel is not shy about taking credit for bombings even if civilians were causualties when they have credible evidence of Hamas presence.

Israel is pretty shy about taking credit for things that get them in hot water in the foreign press. For example, when IDF soldiers deliberately targeted, shot, and then denied medical aid (killing) to American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, the Israeli government blamed her death on Palestinians for months.

>5. Hamas are documented liars in the region and even their Arab neighbors don't trust them.

As noted, Israel are also documented liars.

Anyways, I liked this reporting from the UK which does a pretty good job of laying out the uncertainty one way or the other: https://www.channel4.com/news/who-was-behind-the-gaza-hospit...

I actually think Nate is wrong on this, especially on how he states the wrong-ness of the two parts of the story. It seems very likely to me that initial death counts were overstated. But the probability that it was an Israeli bomb that went off in the parking lot carries a lot more uncertainty and I think there's still a decent chance that it's true. There's still a lot of investigation to be done but, if when all is said and done, it turns out the bomb likely was from Israel, will Nate stick to his own standards of retraction?

Ah, I saw a great tweet that captured a lot of my feelings about this the other day: https://twitter.com/InsightsMachine/status/17018601232984842...

>“Data is the new oil.” Clive Humby, 2006

>“Most of my career to date seems to involve redesigning legacy reports to make it easier for existing users (if any) to see that they contain absolutely no actionable insight with a lot less effort.” Jeff Weir, 2023

For my perspective:

In general, I find most users can't actually say whether they need any given number/visual on an ongoing basis. So large amounts of work go into building dashboards that are used for a very short amount of time and then discarded. Probably we should do a better job on one-off analyses and only dashboard after the fact.

Many users don't actually want a dashboard, what they actually want is a live data dump into excel where they can pivot table it. Maybe, maybe a bar or line chart.

In general, I find people always ask for more filters, more slicers, just endless options to reconfigure the data as they please. But they quickly become trapped in a swamp of their own making, now nobody knows how this should be sorted or sliced, does it even make sense to do it this way? People think what they want is a 'data democracy' with hundreds of dashboards with hundreds of options with hundreds of users and so they ask for and usually receive it. But they usually just end up coming back to the data team and asking - 'so what's the answer?' What many orgs need is actually a data dictator.

On the other hand, dashboards do allow you to establish really good feedback loops within the business so when you can identify an ongoing constraint, figure out how to track it and then force people to receive it on a regular cadence and be accountable to it, you can make a lot of headway. But that's a more niche use-case than how they're frequently used and the skills involved are different - less visualization skills, more business analysis - and you need to be positioned to make sure someone is held accountable.

Maybe for two different definitions of conservative. But it seems easy enough to want to conserve something that the market will destroy, and to realize that one feasible way to do that is nationalization.

Is this not just political polemic?

I guess I'm thinking, okay, so make them do that? If there really is a type of person out there that enjoys providing the free labor of modding so much that they crumple at even a hint of being replaced, then yeah Steve is going to roll over them.

Hm? Where's Lehman?

Have they been disproved empirically? I'm well aware of many theoretical arguments against central planning but I'm not aware of empirical work.

Politicization is a ratchet. The conversation has already been politicized, I don't think there's any avoiding it.

Second, the discussion for all intents and purposes isn't even about Bob Lee, it's about crime in SF. That's why even when it turns out that Bob Lee wasn't killed by a homeless drug addict, the conversation is still about the homeless, drug addicts, petty crime, etc. I think it's illustrative of how wrong it is to use his death this way, even if he had actually been murdered by a vagrant, it would still be wrong.

You can read about what is and isn't allowed here: https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/di...

You might also be interested in reading about why the NLRB was formed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Board

Basically we have a lot of rules about the relationship between unions and companies because when we didn't do that there was a lot of violence.

I think the article misses the real dilemma. Think about all the firms who do payroll through Rippling, should those employees and firms suffer because of something they essentially knew nothing about? We want to avoid moral hazard but we also want to avoid firms going bust for no reason. I think the issue is that big economic players (in this case some billionaires and VCs) point to all the small players that will by wiped out and it feels a bit like a hostage scenario. And in that hostage scenario we're basically always going to choose to socialize the risk. IMO the problem comes when we make decisions to socialize risk without socializing reward. When the two are tied together we eliminate the hostage feeling, now big players know there is a big cost to being saved by the government.

Sometimes that's the best option.

>I would be happy to socialize that upside for higher limits on deposit protection.

Glad we agree then, that's pretty much all I'm looking for.

Why should it matter whether it's deposits or equity or bonds? The instrument is irrelevant to the logic - if I have to back it on the downside then I want a piece of the upside too.

If we have to back them on the downside I want profit on the upside. Private profits and public losses cannot be the rules of the game.

You don't really need precedent, it's just the logical thing to do to get your money out when collapse seems possible. The prisoner's dilemma isn't a dilemma because of 'precedent' or because of arguments, it's just a structural fact.

Kind of annoying that the CEO is writing out details on twitter before they contact the affected companies...

Wow this looks absolutely awesome. I'll need to play around with it a bit but this would be huge for me.